In addition to Silverlight 2 Beta 1 that is made available yesterday, another great product's new version was made available for download. That is beta version of Expression Studio 2. The application suite that is going to help graphic designers and developers working together. The suite includes the following tools Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder. From which, the most valuable for WPF and Silverlight developers is Expression Blend. That is more powerful XAML WYSIWYG designer than that we have in visual studio. There are even facilities to create animation (similar to flash designer if you've seen it)
S. Somasegar provides quick overview of new features that are part of this release:
There are many exciting new features in this release. For example, Expression Web allows you to design PHP documents in addition to ASP.NET 3.5, opening the door for a new range of designers to create their standards-based designs using Microsoft tools. Expression Blend has an improved interface that speeds up your workflow and facilitates navigating your documents more quickly with the new breadcrumb toolbar. Expression Design includes an advanced slicing feature that helps you target individual slices as separate formats, including Silverlight canvas, WPF canvas, WPF resource dictionary, HTML comp, XAML, PSD, and PDF. Expression Media makes digital asset management easy by allowing you to import more than 100 different media formats using drag-and-drop, including digital camera RAW files, then share the resulting catalogue with fellow team members. Finally, Expression Encoder has higher quality and faster encoding for Silverlight and the ability to perform simple video edits.